Nicholas M. Law

Assistant Professor

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Astronomical Instrumentation, Exoplanets and Very Wide Field Surveys

My group's research is based on the new generation of very large time-domain sky surveys and adaptive optics instruments, with a focus on using them for exoplanet detection and characterization. Our major projects are listed below.

Robo-AO is the first robotic laser guide star adaptive optics system. Our small team built it for extremely high-efficiency observing on the Palomar 60-inch telescope. Robo-AO is in full science operation, covering 200+ targets a night for projects ranging from our Kepler-exoplanet chacterization programs to the most-comprehensive binarity survey of nearby stars.

We based our prototype survey at a site in the Canadian High Arctic, close to the North Pole, where the winter's continuous darkness greatly improves our exoplanet detection efficiency. Our robotic cameras have already operated throughout winter 2012/13 and 2013/14 (2013 sunrise here) and have returned over 40TB of data. A paper on the first run's results is here.

PTF/M-dwarfs is a search for giant planets around M-dwarfs using data from the Palomar Transient Factory, as well as followup by other telescopes. We are developing ways to efficiently mine the nearly-100TB PTF supernova-search dataset for rare transit events. So far we have observed over 100,000 M-dwarfs, with sensitivity to planetary transits around each one. A brief description of the project can be found in the PTF science cases paper, a recent poster from the Cool Stars conference is here, and the Cool Stars conference proceedings are here and here. A recent ApJ paper with the first results from the project is here.

PTF is a transient search using an 8-square-degree imager on the Palomar 48-inch telescope. PTF (PI: Shri Kulkarni) is a collaboration of over 70 people in many institutions. The system completed commissioning in summer 2009; a full description of the system is published in Law et al. 2009 (PASP 121.1395L). PTF has already found over a thousand extragalactic transients and discovered a whole new class of supernova!

LAMP: LuckyCam + AO on the Palomar 200" (PI)

Using a combination of Adaptive Optics (AO) and Lucky Imaging we achieved the highest-resolution-ever images taken with visible light from the ground or space. The paper describing the results is here. The project was somehow named one of Time Magazine's best inventions of 2007.

Lucky Imaging

My PhD thesis research was on Lucky Imaging, the first system capable of reliably taking images with Hubble Space Telescope resolution from the ground using visible light and faint guide stars.